I was born and raised in Denver, Colorado, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Technical Communications and Film + Media Arts from Metropolitan State College of Denver in 2003. Somewhere between editing short films and trying to be a computer scientist, I switched my minor to German. That small decision eventually set me on a path that would lead to Berlin.
After college, I wrapped up my last credits at the Goethe Institut in Berlin. Instead of heading back to Colorado, I fell in with an actor's collective and somehow never left. The plan at the time was to shoot a film adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull in a former Stasi bungalow resort. With a Mac laptop and Final Cut Pro under my arm, I spent six months couch-surfing, editing, and collaborating with Austrian director Gilbert Beronneau. That project led to another: Lunik, a film about utopian squatters in Eisenhuttenstadt, backed by the Berlin/Brandenburg Medienboard.
The next decade was my crash course in European filmmaking. I cut independent features and earned my stripes as an assistant editor on Babelsberg productions like The Reader, Pandorum, Hanna, and Renegades. Along the way, I learned how to balance creative storytelling with the technical demands of large studio productions.
One of my most personal projects was Love Songs for Scumbags, which I produced and edited with my longtime friend Phillip Duncan, an underground folk artist from Denver. The film was completed just weeks before Phillip passed away. That experience remains one of the most formative of my career.
Since then, I have continued to edit across genres, from Christian Frosch's Von jetzt an kein zurück, which earned a German Film Critics Association nomination for Best Editing, to the Amazon series Der Lack ist ab by Kai Wiesinger.
Twenty years on, I still believe editing is about more than cutting footage. It is about finding rhythm, shaping emotion, and sometimes knowing when to get out of the way of a great performance.